A Day With a Toddler: Survival Kit

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Have you ever tried to entertain a toddler for an entire day? Let alone day after day, after day…

Toddlers are so fun! They look at everything new in awe and excitement and make you smile.

But they also need something new to see every 3.8 minutes.

Then you suddenly realize that you’re supposed to be teaching them things in all of this entertaining, and well, it gets overwhelming.

I’m generally a working mom, trying to spend as much time with my kids after my time at the office and dealing with all that guilt. But on my recent maternity leave, I got to experience what many do every day: being a stay at home mom. You may already be a pro, but I found that my house was not organized or stocked well for entertaining my kids.

So I talked to my sister, who’s got the stay at home thing down and she reassured me that toddlers are probably the hardest age to make it through the day with.

And then I sat down, looked all over the internet, did some brainstorming, and here are the results!

Every Room Needs Books

I always envisioned reading book after book to my kids. I love reading and I wanted to instill that love in my children. There’s only like a million studies that show that reading to your kids helps them learn language skills, both verbal and written. Reading prepares them for success in school, in every subject. It builds their imagination. Reading to them gives them quality time with you, helps them to feel loved. It entertains, it fuels a love of learning. The list goes on and on!

But I found I wasn’t reading as much as I had planned, and I realized it’s because all the books were downstairs on the bookshelf.

Now, that sounds like a logical place to have them, but it wasn’t working. For something so important, so critical, we needed a new plan.

So I bought a half dozen of these baskets at the dollar store and filled them with all our books. Now there’s a basket in every room of the house. There are always books within easy reach, and we’ve probably quadrupled how often we read together. And if I find we’re reading in one room a lot and we’re getting tired of those books, I can just swap it with another basket.

Yes, this system means I’m going to always be tripping over books. And that books are frequently dumped all over and making a mess. But it’s a small price to pay for positioning my children for success.

Plans for Structured Play/Learning

It also turns out my kid didn’t want to play with his cars all day. Duh! Besides reading, we love music and fun and learning around here, so I put together some kits. Some of these are really only for supervised-time, as they have a huge potential for mess.

Music Box

Various musical instruments from the dollar store and we picked up this music set to add a few more fun things. In addition to instruments, we turn on music to sing and dance and play along with. Sometimes we jam together, with my toddler on the recorder, my baby is wearing bells to jingle as he moves, and I break out the tambourine. And we chant and sing to our jamming.

Arts and Crafts

Anyone with a toddler knows to keep plenty of glue, paint, and paper around. But I didn’t have it all in one place. Nor had I weeded out the kid-friendly stuff from my craft stash. We have quite the little artist on our hands, who’s always up for painting pictures to cover my house! This may actually be our most-used box!

Sand

Growing up, my mom had this cousin that had no kids but adored her nieces and nephews and had this awesome indoor sand box. I loved going to her house to play with it and wanted to have something similar for my kids. We took it up a notch with this awesome kinetic sand, and it’s a hit. Our oldest will sit and massage the sand for nearly an hour, or drive his trucks through it.

Sensory Beads

Another new thing we definitely didn’t have when I was a kid! Mom, Dad and our nanny are just are happy as the kids to sit down and play in these sensory beads! We also picked up some plastic sea creatures, reptiles and bugs to hide under the beads. Or other toys and household items. Then we hunt for them! But most of the time we just stick our hands in and squish them around!

Of course, besides these fun bins we have all kinds of toys and games. Those are spread all over the house for time for less-structured play and fun. And besides playing we make our meals and clean to keep busy all day.

And we still have bored moments. Some boredom is good. But we have four activities (that come with lots of variation) to help us get through our days!

What do you do to survive the day with a toddler?